"...and if two committees can't become one committee, how is a car company supposed to become a rocket company?" said Brandt Kessler of Vertical Synergy Partners, a fund that only backs things turning into other things.
The independent special committees at Tesla and SpaceX, set up to study a merger of the two firms, have merged with each other. Insiders call it a proof of concept, and a very confident one.
The move follows SpaceX's second-ever public earnings call, where Elon Musk backed combining the companies. He also explained his limits. "Because I'm a conflicted party, I can't actually be in the discussions of the special committees," Musk said.
That created a problem for the new combined committee. It must now decide whether its own merger was fair, and it has a conflict of its own. So it formed a sub-committee of six fresh independent directors to check its work. Kessler called this the flywheel. "You stack independence on top of independence until the conflict just rounds down to zero," he said. "That's committee-as-a-service. That's the moat."
